Published on | Prototyping: From UX to Front End — Medium Lia Garvin

When working in a product or program manager type of role, you often feel the weight of the world on your shoulders. People come to you with about schedule, resources, deadline, strategy, career goals, personnel issues, hardware and software needs, budget, anything under the sun — with an expectation that you are supposed to have all of the answers, and have them immediately. But just because people come to you with a problem, it does not mean that you have to solve it, or that you are the right person to solve it. The beauty of being in a role where you are often inside of the eye of the storm, is the clarity to see the bigger picture.

I tend to notice a lot of program managers focusing solely on issues and problems related to the product, and overlooking critical issues to resolve with the people on the team to ensure there is an optimal working environment. I think a big concern people have about digging in and working with people is that they are going to uncover a whole slew of problems that they were not prepared for. Taking this a step further, people are concerned that once they discover the problems, the expectation is that they will solve them for everyone. Ironically, not solving problems for people is sometimes harder than actually solving them, this takes a lot of practice, and a whole lot of patience. It is especially hard if the solution is straightforward and you have to wait around for someone else to get around to doing it. You’re patiently waiting, and then just want to kindly push them out of the way and say, “I’ll take it from here.” But you can’t. The moment you solve a problem for someone, you are on the top of their list to solve the next one, and that person does not learn the skill that you used to solve it. Before you know it you have robbed them of a valuable learning opportunity!

Not solving problems for people does not mean that you ignore the problem, and either pretend it isn’t there or hope it just goes away on its own. No, that’s called enabling the problem. Only itty bitty problems, ones that should not even be defined as problems but maybe as something more harmless sounding like “hiccups”, might sort themselves out by ignoring them or waiting. But these are the exceptions, not the rules.

Real problems require insight and reflection to solve. Helping a person come to the solution by asking them questions and hearing them reason through the roadblocks is where the real growth happens — for both of you.

Solving Problems by Not Solving Them was originally published in prototypr on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Solving Problems by Not Solving Them

Cool stuff, every week

More Articles